Improving, Achieving, Excelling: Developing Inclusive Assessment Processes for a Degree-Level Learning Disability Arts Programme

In Spring 2021, York St John University and Mind the Gap collaborated to validate a Certificate in Higher Education (Cert HE) programme in the Performing Arts for learning disabled and autistic adults. This short article presents some context surrounding inclusive education in the performing arts, identifying the histories of ableism within assessment processes. We then discuss how we worked in consultation with learning disabled students from MTG to develop our bespoke assessment criteria. Our objective was to establish processes that were developed with and understood by learning disabled students and which used language from the students themselves as core definitions. We argue that through establishing inclusive arts education, recognised at degree-level, we can begin the process of enabling greater future representation of learning disabled actors and practitioners in the performing arts sector as a whole